We experimentally study how people form predictive models of simple data generating processes (DGPs), by showing subjects data sets and asking them to predict future outputs. We find that subjects: (i) often fail to predict in this task, indicating a failure to form a model, (ii) often cannot...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e. the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I...